Upside Down

by Jaym Gates

  The cost of being black and ambitious in America is to always be concerned about respectability and restricted by the need to attain it. But because of Mr. Holmes’ rags-to-riches story, it initially seems that Odetta and her family have nonetheless attained the American Dream that eludes so many blacks born into an era of supposed freedom. And for a time, Mr. Holmes is able to maintain the illusion that his money trumps his family’s race.

  However, when Odetta is five years old, disaster strikes in the twin forms of a racist white taxi driver who refuses to let the family into his cab, forcing them to walk through a bad neighborhood (King 233), and Jack Mort, a white serial killer who works for the evil forces the gunslinger and his companions battle throughout the Dark Tower series. Mort drops a brick out of the fourth floor window of an abandoned building onto Odetta’s head, knocking her into a life-threatening coma (King 234). Her mind is literally and figuratively shattered. During the coma, Odetta dreams of Detta, and when she finally regains consciousness, Detta begins to take over Odetta’s body every now and again.

  Unlike the shift between Jekyll and Hyde, there is no overt physical change associated with Odetta Holmes’s shift to Detta Walker; it’s all an alteration of spirit and psychology heralded by Odetta getting a headache. Neither Odetta nor Detta are consciously aware of each other, and they build separate false memories to seal the gaps for themselves. The few characters in the book who are aware of the divided soul sharing her body refer to her condition as a kind of schizophrenia (King 181), whereas a more modern, accurate description of a woman suffering from a similar (though less supernaturally freighted) condition would be dissociative identity disorder instead.

  Regardless of the proper name for Odetta’s condition, it’s fundamentally different from Jekyll’s situation in that she never sought out or asked to become Detta. Her split personality is thrust upon her by the evil of Jack Mort, who attacks her again when she’s a young woman. He sneaks up behind her and shoves her in front of a subway train (King 211). The train cuts off her legs at the knees and Detta Walker comes strongly to the fore as a reaction to the trauma. After that second attack, Detta takes control of Odetta’s body more and more frequently, and these takeovers drive a large portion of the plot of the novel since Detta actively works as an antagonist towards Eddie Dean and Roland the Gunslinger.

  Detta Walker: Jezebel or Justifiable?

  Detta Walker, of course, acts as Hyde to Odetta Holmes’s Jekyll. On the negative side, it’s possible to read Detta Walker as an embodiment of the Jezebel subtype of the Angry Black Woman stereotype, which history professor Blair L.M. Kelley describes in an article for The Root:

  “Jezebel characters ... were fair-skinned, disloyal, greedy and hypersexual but not portrayed as beautiful. These blustering women yelled at their spouses and acted loud and inappropriately in otherwise genteel, public spaces to demonstrate all the ways that they were different from white women. ... These stereotypes served (to) justify the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by painting them as Jezebels, like the biblical wanton woman whose promiscuity and controlling nature was her supposed undoing. The rapes of enslaved women could be laughed away on a minstrel stage that showed black women as temptresses who wanted nothing but money and sexual attention.”

  Given the historical ramifications, the Jezebel stereotype is a painful one; many people criticize it with appropriate harshness when they encounter it. Is King’s portrayal of Detta relying on this kind of pernicious, lazy stereotyping? In her essay on the role of the Gothic double in King’s fiction, Heidi Strengell describes Detta Walker as “sexually insatiable.” However, it’s possible that Strengell is conflating trauma-induced acting out with insatiability. Detta does get a charge from sexually taunting white boys (King 192, 398), talks of sex constantly, and occasionally masturbates, but she’s not shown to actually have sex with anyone. She is pointedly and deliberately not a lady in manner or mind, and takes charge of her sexuality and her own sexual pleasure in a way that inevitably alarms people who expect women — especially women in wheelchairs — to be passive and sexually naïve. But there’s not much evidence in the novel that Detta is particularly promiscuous (she certainly isn’t shown to have slept with as many people as the hero, Roland Deschain).

  Sexuality aside, Detta displays other Jezebel traits. She uses the most inappropriate, most cartoonishly clichéd language possible, and wields profanity like a verbal brickbat against anyone she sees as an enemy (the capitalization below is King’s):

  “YOU AIN’T NUTHIN BUT A BUNCHA HONKY SONSA BITCHES!” she screamed. Her face was monstrous, her eyes full of hell’s own light. It wasn’t even the face of a human being. “GOAN KILL EVERY MAHFAHIN HONKY I SEE! GOAN GELD EM FUST! GOAN CUT OFF THEIR BALLS AND SPIT EM IN THEY FACES!” (King 215)

  Further, she compulsively shoplifts from the upscale department stores that Odetta visits, stealing handfuls of cheap costume jewelry and hiding them in her purse:

  “In the time since the accident it was, for the most part, still Odetta Holmes who was in control, but Detta Walker had come forward more and more, the thing Detta liked to do best was steal. It didn’t matter that her booty was always little more than junk, no more than it mattered that she often threw it away later.

  The taking was what mattered.” (King 217)

  Why does the taking matter to Detta? On a superficial level, it pleases her to stick it to The Man she sees in the form of the wealthy stores’ white male managers and security guards. But her actions are also driven by a deep emotional pain and sense of loss:

  “I took the blue plate because that woman landed me in the hospital and besides I didn’t get no forspecial plate an I bust it cause it needed bustin an when I saw a white boy I could bust why I bust him too I hurt the white boys because they needed hurtin I stole from the stores that only sell things that are forspecial to whitefolks while the brothers and sisters go hungry in Harlem and the rats eat their babies, I’m the one, you bitch, I’m the one, I ... I ... I!” (King 398)

  Detta is certainly behaving in some wildly stereotypical ways in the novel. But systemic bigotry, whether it’s racism or sexism or classism, is insidious: victims and perpetrators alike are exposed to bigotry’s pervasive memes. And, unless an individual takes pains to examine and reject tainted beliefs passed off as universal truths, victims of racism and sexism are likely to internalize that bigotry and believe it to be true, emotionally if not intellectually.

  Detta is Odetta’s reaction to the trauma of Jack Mort’s attacks. She’s the embodiment of all the justified anger Odetta feels in a world where a white man can put a little black girl in a coma for a sadistic laugh and suffer no swift justice. Detta is her living, surviving rage at being pushed onto the tracks and losing her legs. She is everything that Odetta wants to feel and do but cannot because she needs to maintain her social status as a respectable upper-class black woman to be an effective civil rights activist. But as that civil rights activist, Odetta is jailed and humiliated by representatives of the Southern patriarchy:

  “But I think most of them — even the dumb ones and they are by all means not all dumb — know the change will come in the end no matter what they do, and so they take the chance to degrade you while they still can. To teach you you can be degraded. You can swear before God, Christ, and the whole company of Saints that you will not, will not, will not soil yourself, but if they hold onto you long enough of course you do. The lesson is that you’re just an animal in a cage, no more than that, no better than that. Just an animal in a cage. So I wet myself. I can still smell dried urine and that damned holding cell. They think we are descended from the monkeys, you know. And that’s exactly what I smell like to myself right now.

  “A monkey.” (King 184)

  Because of her social role, Odetta can’t act out or take vengeance on the men who forced her to soil herself. She has to be respectable above all else. All she can do is take a bath and try to forget her mistreatment, but she can’t, and she ponders
whether her upper-crust Northern white neighbors secretly think of her in the same negative ways as her Southern captors:

  “(I)t must have galled some of them mightily, knowing there was a nigger living in the penthouse apartment of this fine staid old building ... She hoped it did gall them mightily, and scolded herself for being mean, for being unchristian, but she did wish it, she hadn’t been able to stop the piss pouring into the crotch of her fine silk imported underwear and she didn’t seem to be able to stop this other flood of piss, either. It was mean, it was unchristian, and almost as bad — no, worse, at least as far as the Movement was concerned, it was counterproductive. ... There was more work to be done. Hate would not help do that work. Hate would, in fact, hinder it. But sometimes you went on hating just the same.” (King 185-186)

  Odetta can only stew and chastise herself for stewing ... but Detta can vent that anger. Through that socially unacceptable and therefore wicked rage, Detta represents Odetta’s core strength and drive to fight and survive.

  But Detta is also holding all of Odetta’s darkest fears like a bag of squirming eels, and they have driven her more than half mad with paranoia. She’s been through so many traumas that she is in a state of constant vigilance, constantly expecting more abuse, and Detta’s deranged mind misinterprets and misremembers the other characters’ well-intended attempts at kindness as debasing assaults and insults:

  “She remembered everything: how she had fought them, how they had tied her into her chair, how they had taunted her, calling her niggerbitch, niggerbitch.” (King 244)

  Detta puts up a fearless front with her profanity and feigned wantonness. After all, what does Odetta, who’s got decent, law-abiding, upstanding parents and lives in a more than merely nice neighborhood, know about becoming a wicked woman? She knows the stereotypes she grew up with. Just like everyone else in her America, she’s been to the movies and theatre and has seen the Jezebel character played over and over and presented as a kind of universal truth about the dark side of black womanhood.

  And so Detta deliberately wears the Jezebel costume because that’s who she thinks she needs to be. Her playing Jezebel is partly a ruse to hide her considerable intelligence and cunning from people who would try to hurt her, partly a rejection of and rebellion against the respectability politics foisted on upper-class blacks that constantly constrict Odetta, and partly an adoption of the closest thing the mainstream media has ever offered her in the way of a strong counter-cultural female persona. The reaction of the other characters to her over-the-top speech and behavior supports this interpretation:

  “It was crazy. She talked like a cartoon black woman, Butterfly McQueen gone Loony Tunes.” (King 215).

  “Eddie nodded. “That was an act, and she knew it was an act. But she’s a pretty good actress and she fooled both of us for a few seconds. The way she’s talking is an act, too. But it’s not as good. It’s so stupid, so goddamn hokey ... she talks like a cliché” ” (King 264)

  Even if a reader is inclined to think that King is simply dealing in unexamined, unmitigated racial stereotyping in Detta’s characterization, she still represents a subversion of Hyde. Why? Because Odetta, literally and figuratively, needs Detta in order to survive. Detta isn’t slowly killing Odetta as Hyde slowly destroys Jekyll. She has been saving her, over and over; she doesn’t intend to, largely because she doesn’t even consciously know Odetta exists, but by saving herself she also saves her proper, upstanding alter ego. Detta mostly fights against all the wrong things and makes terrible choices, but she keeps fighting and doesn’t give up. Odetta would not have survived losing her legs on the track had Detta not come forward to fight against death:

  “She — or it — also seemed superhuman. This screaming, writhing thing could not have just undergone impromptu surgery by subway train half an hour ago. She bit. She clawed out at him again and again.” (King 215)

  Hyde is the deliberate indulgence of a man who uses his privileged status within the patriarchy to avoid the legal and social consequences of his misdeeds. Conversely, Detta is the survival reaction of a black woman struggling to stay alive in the face of the traumas inflicted upon her by a more modern version of that same patriarchy. And that theme of indulgence versus survival is a fundamental and critical difference between the two characters.

  Another critical difference between Detta and Hyde lies in their respective physical ability. Hyde is small and weak compared to Dr. Jekyll but is essentially able-bodied, although he’s clearly an early incarnation of what TVTropes.org refers to as the “Depraved Dwarf” character. Detta, however, is a classic example of the “Handicapped Badass” character type: she’s become a far deadlier opponent since she lost her legs, and the other characters in the novel fear and respect her skills and cunning.

  Susannah Dean: The Drawing of the Third

  At the end of Stevenson’s novella, Jekyll, who deliberately sought out Hyde and has always been the aware architect of his existence, gives up all hope once he realizes he cannot stop from turning into Hyde:

  “Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? Or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself.” (Stevenson 92)

  The result of Jekyll’s giving up is that Hyde takes poison and kills them both. There’s a very traditional Christian morality at work there, namely in the idea that man’s dark impulses cannot be a necessary force and must be purged at all costs. In this view, humanity is innately sinful, but it is only through the vigilant rejection of that sin that a man can succeed and thrive. There’s never any room in that kind of morality for Jekyll and Hyde to reconcile and join forces.

  The situation is critically different for Detta and Odetta. They have lived their separate lives with no conscious awareness of each other’s existence until the gunslinger, Roland, forces them to see each other as they stand in a dimensional portal between worlds (King 397). At first, the two are just as hostile to each other as Jekyll and Hyde might be were they to confront one another directly: “The two women lay face to face, bodies raised like snakes about to strike, fingers with identical prints locked around throats marked with identical lines.” (King 397). But Odetta, remembering her work as an activist and Eddie Dean’s love for her, realizes that hatred is counterproductive, surrenders herself, and embraces her dark half:

  “She could no more kill the hag and survive than the hag could kill her and walk away. ...

  Odetta let go of Detta’s throat, ignored the fierce hands throttling her, crushing her windpipe. Instead of using her own hands to choke, she used them to embrace the other.

  (S)he could only whisper in the witch-woman’s ear: “I love you.”

  For a moment the hands tightened into a killing noose . . . and then loosened.

  Were gone.

  She was being turned inside out again ... and then, suddenly, blessedly, she was whole. … She had been one; she had been two; now the gunslinger had drawn a third from her.” (King 398-399)

  This scene is reminiscent of the climactic final confrontation between the wizard Ged and his shadow in Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and it’s got the same kind of epic feel. In the context of everything Detta and Odetta have been through in the novel, the scene of Odetta’s love and forgiveness and faith (reflective of modern, less judgmental Christianity than the strain portrayed in Stevenson’s novella) and their merging into a new, whole person is one of the most exhilarating in the book. The gunslinger acts as midwife to the birth of Susannah Dean (as the new woman chooses to call herself, partly to signal her love for Eddie Dean), but she is a self-made woman through and through.

  Conclusion

  King’s portrayal of Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes represents an interesting, modern update of the trope of the fractured soul as established by Stevenson in his original portrayal of Jekyll and Hyde. King moves past Stevenson’s focus on class and physical appearance and explores more of t
he complexities of race, gender, and ability in his portrayals. In doing so, King presents a far more evolved, interesting set of characters. Even if King’s characterization can be interpreted as racially flawed due to Detta’s stereotypical behavior, a study of how King accomplished his characterization in contrast with Stevenson’s would be fruitful for authors who are looking for ways of using and modernizing classic character tropes in their own work.

  Works Cited

  Eaton, Lance. “The Hulking Hyde: How the Incredible Hulk Reinvented the Modern Jekyll and Hyde Monster.” Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. p. 138-155. Print.

  “Handicapped Badass.” TV Tropes. TVTropes.org. Web. 18 Apr. 2016.

  Harris, Fredrick C. “The Rise of Respectability Politics.” Dissent Magazine, Winter 2014. Web. 23 Oct. 2015.

  Jekyll. By Steven Moffat. Perf. James Nesbitt. BBC America, 2007. DVD.

  Kelley, Blair L.M. “Here’s Some History Behind That ‘Angry Black Woman’ Riff the NY Times Tossed Around.” The Root, 25 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 Oct. 2015.